Research and analysis

Work Coach provision of employment support

This report summarises research into how well Work Coaches were able to provide and refer to employment support in 2021 and 2022.

Documents

Work Coach provision of employment support

Work Coach provision of employment support

Details

This report was commissioned to evaluate:

  • how well Work Coaches were able to provide employment support to Universal Credit claimants
  • how well Work Coaches were able to directly support claimants with the provision of support to find work and with referrals to appropriate support programmes

The report was requested in 2021 by the Public Accounts Committee in light of the Department having recruited thousands of additional new Work Coaches during the coronavirus pandemic. The contents of the report are drawn from several phases of fieldwork from a wider research project known as the ‘Cross-Cutting Evaluation of Plan for Jobs’, which is a system-level evaluation of some of DWP’s parts of the Plan for Jobs offer.

Research value

The research focuses on a challenging period of time when the number of Universal Credit claimants had risen quickly and a large new number of support offers had been introduced to help people gain employment. It helped the Department to understand how well employment support was being delivered and provided assurance that levels of satisfaction with support were generally high.

Updates to this page

Published 25 May 2023

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